The Doctor’s Diagnosis: A-
Well, this is not what I was expecting. If you haven’t seen Barbarian, then I suggest that you stop reading this after the first paragraph and go see it. While I’m going to avoid spoilers as much as possible, this is a movie that you want to go into completely cold. I am absolutely recommending this, but I could also see a lot of people being annoyed with me for making that recommendation because this movie is bonkers. Absolutely fucking bonkers.
Going into Barbarian, I knew nothing about it beyond what I saw in the trailer. The trailer, it turns out, is incredibly misleading and is only representative of about the first half hour of the movie. As shown in the trailer, a young woman named Tess (played by Georgina Campbell, whom I don’t think I know from anything else) arrives at an Air BnB that she booked in a bad neighborhood. She discovers that the house was double-booked and there is already a guy named Keith (played by Bill Skarsgård) staying there. With few other options, they decide to share the place for the night. The trailer (and the movie itself up to this point) implies that Skarsgård isn’t all that he seems and a fairly conventional thriller, albeit with a clever setup, will commence. Then things go off the frigging rails.
Before continuing, the first 30-40 minutes are worthy of separate commentary. While it probably isn’t actually the first movie to address this, Barbarian is the first horror movie that I’ve seen to tackle just how creepy the concept of Air BnB is. As Scream illustrated the benefits of cell phones for serial killers back in the 90s, Barbarian taps into how bizarrely comfortable we have become with renting a stranger’s house. What if they are a maniac? What if there is a torture room in the basement? What if something goes terribly wrong? These are all things that beg to be tapped into by the modern horror genre and the opening act of Barbarian does a fantastic job of showing just how vulnerable one can be in a system that values convenience over all else, including safety. Both Campbell and Skarsgård are fantastic as realistic, layered characters that the audience struggles to get a clear read on. These opening stages are reminiscent of Psycho in terms of both tone and the theme of the vulnerability of travel, with modern property rentals replacing the anonymity of remote motels.
Also like Psycho, the film then takes an abrupt turn. In this case, the turn is much more drastic because it is a turn of both plot and tone. What starts as a Hitchcockian thriller very abruptly goes down a rabbit hole that includes elements of The Hills Have Eyes, Don’t Breathe, The People Under the Stairs and just a dash of Evil Dead 2 thrown in for extra crazy sauce. One minute the movie is really intense and the next minute I was almost crying I was laughing so hard. The tonal shifts come hard and fast and the result is truly jarring. The suspenseful tone of the first half hour gives way to great makeup effects and some of the best gore effect that I’ve seen in years. I particularly appreciated seeing my all-time favorite Mortal Kombat fatality brought to life (Quan Chi’s fatality in Mortal Kombat 4, obviously). Barbarian features the most abrupt tonal shift since From Dusk till Dawn, but unlike From Dusk till Dawn, the shift isn’t spoiled by the trailers. And as From Dusk till Dawn was going to be a Tales from the Crypt movie, Barbarian very much feels like a story that the Crypt Keeper would tell.
If I have a quibble, its that the tone shifts become almost a bit too much at some points. In particular, there is a disturbing flashback sequence inserted into the second half that provides critical backstory, but is completely misaligned with the tone of everything else around it. The individual sequences work very well, but one almost gets narrative whiplash when they are combined. I also wish that we could see an alternate version of this movie where the setup in the first act is continued in a less insane fashion, as there is another really good (and really different) movie to be made from that premise. I’m happy with what we got, but there is definitely a more serious film to be mined from this material and its an idea worth exploring in a different film.
I can’t believe that this movie got made by a major studio (and frigging Disney, no less) and got released into thousands of theaters. They don’t make ‘em like this very often anymore, folks. What’s even weirder is that the director, Zach Cregger, has only made one other movie and it’s a teen comedy called Miss March from 2008. Not a goddamn thing about this movie’s existence makes sense, but it is the kind of fun, bizarre insanity that is destined to become a cult hit.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian_(2022_film)#/media/File:Barbarian_2022_film_poster.png
